Pub­li­ca­tions

Quirks in mod­ern awards #4: No over­time rates for casu­als in the Hor­ti­cul­ture Award 2010

Nov 10, 2017 — Simon Obee, Associate

The major­i­ty of employ­ees in Aus­tralia are cov­ered by an indus­try / occu­pa­tion spe­cif­ic mod­ern award. Whilst many of the awards con­tain sim­i­lar pro­vi­sions, in this series of occa­sion­al arti­cles we exam­ine unusu­al award claus­es which are some­times missed by employers.

Most mod­ern awards pro­vide that all employ­ees – full-time, part-time and casu­al – are paid over­time rates when they work over a cer­tain num­ber of ​“ordi­nary hours” per day or week, or when they per­form work out­side a cer­tain ​“span” of hours.

Typ­i­cal­ly the first two or three hours of over­time are paid at time-and-a-half and there­after at double-time.

How­ev­er, as clause 22 of the Hor­ti­cul­ture Award 2010only defines what ​“ordi­nary hours” are for full-time and part-time employ­ees, the impli­ca­tion is that there is no lim­it to the ordi­nary hours a casu­al employ­ee can work and no over­time is payable.